Nostalgia over Old Windows Apps

[s0me0nesmind1]

I'm someone that is pretty typical with backups. I often will reformat from time to time and would make sure I have every single program I ever utilize backed up just to make sure I can have a clean install every time.

But god damn I've been reviewing some of backup apps and it's really made me realize how old I am simply because I don't use even 1/4 of these anymore.

Below are just some of what I still have that I definitely haven't touched in like... 7+ years.

1. RAR password recovery
2. Access Diver - old style brute forcer that can be used with a combolist / proxy list
3. Burning Suites - Nero / Roxio / Ashampoo
4. Auslogic Disk Defrag - lol haven't defrag'd in forever since having SSD. Plus I think Windows these days will auto defrag?
5. Antivirus suites - Haven't touched any of these in a long time.
6. Spyware stuff - Spybot S&D, Adaware, etc...
7. Cain & Abel Windows PW recovery
8. dBan (AKA Dericks Boot & Nuke) - Still useful today.
9. Codecs - Particularly the Kazaa Lite Codec pack... I remember before VLCPlayer it was a PITA to make sure you had all the codecs needed to watch videos and play media.
10. DVD Decrypter - Back when I actually used to rip CDs/DVDs
11. Ettercap
12. Forum Proxy Leecher - basically as it says - would go out to forums and grab as many proxies as possible.
13. mIRC / Invision - Haven't touched IRC in forever.
14. PS3 Media Server - back when I still used a console this was actually pretty handy.

 

[lxskllr]

I used to have a bunch of windows utilities, but I think I deleted them in the last couple years. I don't see them on my drives anywhere.

edit:
They may be on my old vista drive. I never hooked it back up when I got this new computer. Most of them were useful, but perhaps a bit outdated. I kept them for troubleshooting, repair, and modification of windows systems, but I don't deal with windows much anymore. Most of the computers I use/admin are gnu/linux.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I was going through looking for something in my "installers" folder as I used to keep installer files for everything so when I do a clean install I already have them all, and man some of the stuff I have is super old. Like p2p file sharing programs etc.

With Linux it's a bit harder to hold on to stuff like that since everything is installed directly through the internet like through apt/yum etc and stuff gets updated so fast now days it's not worth keeping installers anyway.

One of these days I want to rebuild one of my old windows 2000 PCs just for nostalgia. Hopefully I kept all the drivers. I still have the CRT monitor that I bought back in the day. I had originally gave it to my sister and then she just got rid of her computer and gave it back. It's one of those things where the nostalgia would probably wear off fairly fast though, like I would not exactly use it for anything.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

One of these days I want to rebuild one of my old windows 2000 PCs just for nostalgia. Hopefully I kept all the drivers. I still have the CRT monitor that I bought back in the day. I had originally gave it to my sister and then she just got rid of her computer and gave it back. It's one of those things where the nostalgia would probably wear off fairly fast though, like I would not exactly use it for anything.

Psh, thats what virtual installations are for.

 

[lxskllr]

I use a 2kpro vm at work almost every day. I have a piece of antique software that needs either old windows or dos. Sometime, I might see if I can get it going in freedos, but it isn't high on my priority list.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Psh, thats what virtual installations are for.

It's not the same, need the clear acrylic plastic case and flashy blue CFL lights going on. And that floppy drive sound during post.


Though come to think of it I wonder if old win2k games like Rollercoaster tycoon would run in a VM... I think I tried that already though. Anything that uses any kind of graphics acceleration typically won't run in a VM. It won't even load.

 

[Muse]

I have skads of old installation programs stashed away on my server. It does happen that a newer version sucks and an older one is what I want.

I have a couple of 16 bit programs that I still use and for good reasons. For that, I use 32 bit Windows machines, so I'll retain them for the foreseeable future.